Not long after Richard Meier opened his office in 1963, he designed a series of houses that quickly became among the most celebrated residential icons of the postwar era. Projects like the Smith House and the Saltzman House established Meier as an architect who took the vocabulary of modernism, stripped it of its harshness, and spun it into objects of almost breathtaking beauty. Meier’s dwellings of glass, metal, and wood were almost invariably white in color, light in feeling, and exceptionally elegant in composition.

These days Meier—who just celebrated the 50th anniversary of his practice—has little time for houses, focusing his energies instead on designing museums, corporate headquarters, and luxurious condominium towers across the globe. But he continues to take on the occasional residential commission, in part because he uses the smaller-scale projects as a laboratory for ideas and in part because such work inevitably engenders a more intimate relationship with the client. "We keep saying, ‘No more,’" remarks Meier. "When clients come saying they want to build a house, I tell them they’re crazy—it takes so much time and energy. We tell them to go and buy one instead."

But some clients persist, and one senses that Meier is glad not all of them accept his demurrals. He likes nothing better than working closely with clients he feels a connection to. At a cocktail reception for his firm’s 50th last fall, the guest list included some of his earliest clients, among them five who still live in the houses Meier designed for them in the ’60s.

A few years ago, when Meier received a call from a young professional couple in Luxembourg requesting a meeting to discuss the possibility of him creating a home for them and their two young sons, his first instinct was to offer up all of his usual cautions. Were they really prepared to spend more than a year and a half planning a house and at least that amount of time building it? And while Meier had done plenty of work in Europe, the fact that he was based in New York could only add to the logistical challenges.

By the time the meeting took place, however, the husband and wife had researched a number of architects and decided that Meier was their first choice. They flew to New York to sit down with him and one of his partners, Bernhard Karpf, and the two architects came away impressed with the couple’s seriousness and commitment. It was soon clear that a Richard Meier house was in the offing.

The proposed site, a modest-size plot facing a street on one side with open fields on the other, was a far cry from the expansive properties Meier has often been asked to build on. And it was further constrained by a substantial incline. "The site wasn’t ideal," Meier recalls. "It was sort of sloping the wrong way, and that made it difficult to think about how you would enter the house."

But Meier and Karpf concluded that the challenging parcel offered an opportunity to solve one of those seemingly straightforward problems that has vexed many residential architects: what to do with cars. "This was one place where it actually worked to park your car inside the house and still enter by the front door," Meier says. He designed the dwelling as a three-story rectangular box, with a garage on the bottom level, tucked discreetly into the slope. Just outside the garage, a grand gray granite staircase rises to a terrace and the main entrance.

The partially submerged lower level makes the house read as two instead of three stories high, so it doesn’t tower over its neighbors. The home is a sensitively wrought composition of white enameled-aluminum panels and glass, strongly horizontal and more understated than some of the architect’s other houses, as if he were trying to respect the low-key nature of both the site and the clients, who came to him seeking modernist rigor, not flamboyance. If all of Meier’s work owes a certain debt to European modernism of the 1920s, for most of his career he has pushed its boundaries, trying to make something livelier and more lyrical out of that tradition. Here, he has pulled in, tightening his discipline and crafting a structure whose beauty comes, more so than in many Meier works, from a powerful sense of restraint.

For privacy, the house is largely solid on the street side, its glass walls and balconies screened by a façade of white panels, with strategic openings to admit sunlight. On the other side, facing the landscape, the metal sections recede and the glass takes over, exposing the rooms generously to the light and to the views of the fields beyond. The reserved street-side exterior hides a spatial extravagance as well: The entrance stairs and hall flow into the airy main living room, one end of which soars two full stories and is clad in walls of glass, an elegant configuration of line and shape that continues a lineage extending all the way back to the Smith House. A gently curving balcony containing a sitting room and study overlooks the double-height space.

All of the interior walls, as in most of Meier’s residential projects, are painted white—the architect likes to say that a home’s color comes from the people inside and from nature outside—and the floors are of dark-gray granite. The rooms are sparsely furnished with carefully chosen, precisely positioned pieces. But there is nothing prim about the austerity here. The living room has voluptuous white sofas by Minotti that have been thoughtfully set to encourage both gazing outdoors and sociability, while in the upstairs study, red modular seating flanks the fireplace, providing a space for private conversation.

Natural light is everywhere, and the white walls and expanses of glass mean that the character of the rooms changes constantly. "The house is so wonderful in the light. We see it differently every season—every day really," the wife says. "When we first moved in, we couldn’t believe we were living inside all of this beauty."

"It is really a very cozy family house, which I know most people wouldn’t believe because it was designed by Richard Meier," she continues. "But it adapts to all of our needs." She notes that their children love it—as do their children’s friends. "I find their compliments the best ones of all," she says. "They don’t even know who Richard Meier is."